Like a lot of Hammer’s 1970s films, there are plenty of interesting ideas bubbling away in Robert Young’s Vampire Circus which, despite drawing on many of the ideas and tropes to be found in the company’s now extensive back catalogue, still manages to feel unlike anything they’d ever done before. It’s compromised by the fact that the inexperienced Young (this was his first film) and let the production schedule get away from him. When the planned six weeks started slipping into week seven with no immediate end in sight, company head Michael Carreras pulled the plug, handed over the footage Young had shot to editor Peter Musgrave and told him to do what he could. That the film turned out to be as interesting as it is, is nothing short of miraculous.

It opens with an extraordinary 13-minute prologue that sets the stage for what’s to come with its emphasis on sex and eye-watering violence. In the small Serbian town of Stetl, Anna Mueller (Domini Blythe), infatuated with the vampiric Count Mitterhouse (Robert Tayman), leads a young girl, Jenny (Jane Darby) to his castle where she’s killed. Anna’s husband (Laurence Payne) rouses the villagers to storm the castle where, after a violent struggle, they finally manage to stake Mitterhouse. He dies cursing the village, vowing that their children will die to restore him to (un)life. The castle is dynamited and Mitterhouse’s cruel reign seems to be at an end. Fifteen years later Stetl is sealed off from the surround area, stricken with plague. Superstitious locals fear that Mitterhouse has returned but new doctor, Kersh (Richard Owens), dismisses their fears.

Somehow, the travelling Circus of Night manages to slip through the cordon of armed men willing to shoot anyone trying to get in or out of the village and sets up in shop in Stetl. The circus is led by an unnamed gypsy woman (Adrienne Corri) who tells the villagers that they’re here “to steal the money from dead men’s eyes” and number among their performers a strongman (Dave Prowse), twin acrobats (Lalla Ward and Robin Sachs), a dancing tiger woman and her partner (Serena and Milovan), a white-faced dwarf clown (Skip Martin) and Emil (Anthony Higgins, credited here as Anthony Corlan, almost unrecognisable as the young lead in Taste the Blood of Dracula (1699)) who transforms into a panther and is Mitterhouse’s cousin. Soon the village’s children are going missing as the vampires of the Circus of Night set about reviving Mitterhouse.

The fact that Vampire Circus was made almost entirely by new hands at Hammer might explain why it feels so refreshingly different to their other work. As noted, Young was making his first film, scriptwriter Judson Kinberg had mainly been credited as an associate producer on American films (though the idea for the title and basic story came from George Baxt who had contributed uncredited scenes to The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958)) and producer Wilbur Stark had long been a television producer in the States (he went on to be executive producer on John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982)). Old hands were on board in technical positions (Moray Grant handled the photography while Roy Skeggs supervised production) but the key creatives were new to Hammer and largely new to the genre.

The cast is an interesting one – Adrienne Corri and Dave Prowse are reunited from the previous year’s A Clockwork Orange, old hand Thorley Walters is both seriously determined and charmingly buffoonish as the town’s burgomeister and there are familiar faces like Laurence Payne, also reuniting with Corri after their appearances in The Tell-Tale Heart (1960) and Lynne Frederick on board. John Moulder-Brown is just awful as the youthful lead, stiff, wooden and entirely unconvincing throughout, but the rest of the cast are mostly very good. Tayman (who was dubbed by David de Keyser) looks like a glam rock vampire but still manages to be more ferocious and terrifying than many of his contemporaries and his opening scenes with Domini Blyth are among the erotic the company had yet made. The fact that Mitterhouse is so interested in the village’s children adds a deeply unsettling undertone that no other Hammer film ever had, and the film doesn’t flinch away from showing the bodies of dead children, mutilated by the vampire bites that killed them.

As a result of the film’s troubled production, there’s a certain dream-like incoherence to the story that might have scuppered any other film, but which works well here. The circus itself has an ethereal, fairy tale quality to it with its transforming performers whose tricks don’t seem to faze the locals one bit, its flying acrobats and its wonderfully surreal house of mirrors. It’s hard not to think of Ray Bradbury’s 1962 novel Something Wicked This Way Comes (adapted by Disney in 1983) and Charles G. Finney’s The Circus of Dr. Lao from 1935, filmed by George Pal in 1964 as 7 Faces of Dr. Lao, all three films set in strange travelling circuses full of supernatural performers and attractions.

Vampire Circus is beautifully designed (by Scott MacGregor) and photographed (by Grant, whose association with Hammer dates back to camera operating on The Adventures of P.C. 49: Investigating the Case of the Guardian Angel (1949)) but the special effects suffer from a lack of resources. Young sometimes uses creative cutting to startlingly good effect, but it really needed more money to do its ambitions justice. Individual images and sequences though are extraordinary – the erotically charged dance of the naked tiger woman and her “tamer”; a dwarf clown peeling off his mask to reveal a white-painted face beneath and later smiling knowingly at the camera, implicating the audience in his actions; an impressive death-by-falling-cross scene; the use of real bats to (finally!) put to rest those dreadful bouncy rubber rodents that had never failed to look anything but ridiculous in earlier films.

Vampire Circus isn’t by any means the best of Hammer’s 70s output – the compromised production leave it wanting in too many areas – but it’s certainly one of the most interesting. It was encouraging that even this late in the day Hammer could find people who could bring a new spin to well-worn ideas. Had it been better resourced and been allowed to be completed it might have taken Hammer’s vampire films off in a whole new direction.

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